


Battleground

by Ganger (Aiffe)



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: F/M, Love/Hate, Pseudo-Incest, heart guro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-19
Updated: 2009-11-19
Packaged: 2017-11-08 06:23:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/440120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aiffe/pseuds/Ganger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their fight against love is a battle to the death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battleground

**Author's Note:**

> For [iyhedonism](http://iyhedonism.livejournal.com)'s prompt, "Mamihlapinatapai," which is a Yaghan (Tierra del Fuego) word boasted in the Guinness Book of World Records as the all-time "most succinct word" and hardest to translate. As quoted in Wikipedia, the word describes "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start."

He is the only thing she hates. He is the only thing she sees.  
  
Every day she dreams of killing him. But she can sense it: his life flows through her, and if he dies, she will die too. The thread of life that binds them is strangling her.  
  
She knows that she is part of him, and it is a testament to his own self-loathing that she hates him so. If he'd had a healthier soul, their bond would have been beyond lovers, beyond parent and child, beyond twins. Their hearts would beat as one. But Naraku has a fascination with defiling the strongest of love and turning it into hate. This is his most ambitious corruption. Kagura's hatred is his greatest victory against love.  
  
Yet sometimes, when she looks at him, something in her nature can't help but stir. For an instant, beyond her control, she longs for his love. Perhaps, in that bare instant, she loves him too. Then she hates him more and hates herself for daring to think that way about a man who has hurt her so much.  
  
She is sure her hatred is stronger than her body's ties to his life. She will win.  
  
-  
  
Naraku understands that it is his body's nature to love her. But love is not something he trusts, and it has become so twisted in his mind. He loves Kikyou as well, and that feeling is one with the memory of her blood on his claws, her purity biting into his flesh. Love or hate: it's all pain in the end.  
  
For an instant he looks at her, and he thinks she is beautiful. Not beautiful just as a woman, or even as a weapon, but in her passion, her rarefied hatred that has not become so tangled as his own. She is everything he would be, if he were worthy of love.  
  
He thinks sometimes that he could simply rape her. She is his slave, her body and soul his property. Would that not cure him of his longing, cement her hatred of him, and remind her of her subservience to him? But he dares not. It would be such a fine line between doing it to hurt her, and doing it to be close to her, even with her blood and tears. He doesn't trust himself to keep his distance if he so much as touches her. She must remain his tool, disposable. So he treats her like poison.  
  
One final glance between them: a little bit of hope in her eyes; the string pulls a little tighter. She is free for that instant, and not free—no longer bound by his command, but still bound by blood, always bound by blood. As he looks at her, he is so proud of everything she is, and feels a profound sense of longing for her, as though if he cannot touch her and be one with her again, he will die.  
  
He penetrates her chest with his tentacles, touching her for the first time since her making. He feels the electric contact of her blood on his flesh; the sigh of the air escaping her punctured lungs. He injects his shouki into her, a deep, shuddering satisfaction running all through him, and he loves her.  
  
He's lost.


End file.
